The Curious Case of Hanging Laundry

I am extremely perturbed today. I have learnt from various sources that it’s against gentle manners to dry your laundry out on balconies, your balconies of your houses, out here in Brussels. I also learn that this is true for many countries around the world, but about those mennu kee. I’m not looking for comfort in numbers here. I am, right now, looking at the sun shining on my balcony, and with a gentle wind calling out to the washed laundry piled in the bucket near my feet, waiting to be freed.

Yes, freed. I’m sure wet clothes have feelings too. That they like to hang freely after what they go through in the washing machines. To wave their arms and legs and hems and holes as they dry in the wind and sunshine. And what about their daily dose of Vitamin D? No, this isn’t my angry state of mind muttering untruths to me. This is the absolute truth. It pinches as hard as the hardest clothes-clip the very moment you have to push your clothes rack into your drawing room, and start hanging your soaking laundry there, hoping this summer of 09 will last forever.    

For a city which barely manages to get enough sun in a year to make rai ka achaar, I find this tradition absolutely unbelievable. Or maybe, they just don't know what they're missing!

Hairy Legs, Brussels and ‘I think she likes me’

The hair on my arms is the length of my toes. The hair on my legs has reached my toes. I wouldn’t say it is a completely new experience, but it is certainly most novel to experience it when a country is celebrating, yes celebrating, all 13 degrees of its summers with skin and sunshine. On the cobbled streets of Brussels I am probably the only one wearing stretch denims while the world is sprinting ahead of me in airy, breezy and frivolously delicious summer clothes. The moment I spot a pair of smooth legs enjoying the sunshine, it is as if the jeans grow four sizes smaller to kill me with asphyxiation, or whatever the hell tight jeans can do to your health when the heart burns green. 

But my hands are tied. 

I am thousands of kilometres away from a long-trusted tin of Shabnam Cold Wax (Rs 70) and a packet of disposable white waxing strips (Rs 25). Are there no salons in Brussels, you ask? There’s one in every Rue, but with my level of fluency in French I believe I might as well discuss foreign policy with a plant, and succeed in having a path-breaking dialogue, than explain to la fille successfully that I need a wax. Um, there is another reason why I have been Google translating salon menus but not garnering the courage to enter and ask for a pure and simple wax. 

It seems to me to be a secret kind of … something. It caught me by surprise. And I have been trying to unravel it as much as I have been my overgrown eyebrows from my lashes.

Once, at this museum in Delhi…

When news of a midnight fire destroying Delhi’s National Museum of Natural History broke, and images of the building’s façade black with soot went viral, I was struck with a strange sense of loss. Strange it seemed, for neither did I grow up in Delhi for my childhood memories to feature trips to this museum, nor was it among the popular places I frequented as a student of Delhi University for five years, and later as a journalist. Why was I sad then? What was it that made me lament the mishap as if the loss of a museum is a personal loss? Was it because it made me remember a visit to another museum, once…

The National Museum, New Delhi, was the first museum my son saw, one afternoon in the month of April. He had just turned two. My husband and I had strapped him in the car and converted an otherwise lazy afternoon into one where we were ‘doing things’ with our bubba. I had teased him for his nine years in Kolkata, which that day proved him a Bengali-parent-type by taking a tot to teach in a museum before the said tot’s molars were out! He in turn had smiled and ventured with conviction how much fun it’ll be. Come on! So I packed a WW III survival kit with finger foods, juice, hat, spare shorts, mosquito repellent cream, wet wipes, water and his favourite book. I knew I would be sitting reading to him in a cool corner, as his father fulfilled his own childhood fantasies, not having got enough of those while growing up with his face shoved inside a museum window in museum land! 

And guess what? The book wasn’t needed at all! 

The feet which climbed the few stairs at the entrance went thappad-thappad, excited just to be climbing. But the steps matured into slower taps once inside. Suddenly, the roof was soooo high, the huge room had more than the usual four walls (one, two, three, four, FIVE, SIX…) and the shiny corridor leading us in was lined with rows of statues. Hello! Are you stone?

Suddenly, there was so much to see! Further and further in and up and up towards the sky. 

The moment we entered the grand building, my son entered his own grander world of imagination seldom disturbed with facts or need to eat or pee. Curious. Quiet. Contained. With his head turning angles to really, poperly see. With his toes taking his weight so inside exhibits he could do peep-peep. With ‘what’s that and that and that?’ the only question, whispered so as not to hear his unnerving echo, and with an enthu-father ready at his service with simplified answers. Enjoying the company of his thoughts he walked. Enjoying his ‘serious’ side we followed like followers. 

He had to see everything, right till the tiniest of artifacts which never before had seen so much attention. And we saw everything too through his eyes, as we looked at him seeing and describing everything in his limited vocabulary but with limitless joy. It is a joy I fondly remember when I think of it. I look at these to remember it…

Those who are remembering their visits to the National Museum of Natural History probably have memories of the place to turn back to in their most boring, idle, happy or lonely times. But no more do they have the same place. A lot of history has been lost in this fire, of course. Objects of immense value, which preserved within them a lifetime of stories, reduced to ashes. And then comes a question...   

When places vanish into clouds of smoke or wars of time, what happens to our personal histories; individual histories created as we live? Isn't it good to believe that even though places of note may be no more, or change faces like our hometowns, or be named anew on a whim, our memories of them cannot be taken from us? They are ours to own, like undocumented, dormant, sometimes silenced but always intimate thoughts which make precious home in our hearts and minds. Those bits which remain inside us till we remain, like unwound movie reels, sometimes forever, and other times flowing before our mind’s eyes in high speed. Triggered into limelight. Woken into remembrance. 

Just like this morning, when I watched one museum burn, I stepped into a different one. That was the first museum my son saw…

Swimming-Shimmying

I love swimming. Especially early in the mornings. You know, when the birds are twittering awake and the sun playfully winking at them from behind lush green trees swaying lightly to the cool and clear wind and …

Right, as if! When you wake up to 35 degrees at 6:00 am, the birds are tweeting rants in more than 140 characters and the brown trees trying their best to give the sun a blue eye for being such a butcher in heat. 

You exit your air-conditioned room where your cherub happily snores and it’s as if you entered a black hole spinning closest to the Sun. You gulp your cold coffee in precisely five sips lest it turns warm. As warm as the “fresh water” CPWD releases your way for an hour expecting you to tank-up and shank-down before the heat evaporates their whole office and the pipes run dry for the rest of your baking day. You water your plants and they seem too tired to raise their heads in gratitude even. Depressing. Try reading a newspaper under a fan-on-five-number and you might as well do dardey disco with your arms, neither needing eyes nor brains. 

And so, I thought of joining a DDA Sports Complex nearby to use their pool and spend some hot morning time feeling like a cool mermaid, swimming-shimmying up. And it is sitting exactly there, on a white sun bathing chair (which we Indians use like berths in a train) under an umbrella that came free with Bagpiper Whiskey, that I write this. Sitting by the side of the pool which my toes touched a few minutes back.

If I did not belong to Haridwar’s neighbour, I would have thought this is the ghat people come to dip their free sizes in after freely sinning. Citizens of a whole continent are in this pool right now, a length which takes me no more than 15 seconds to cover – all interruptions included. Like excited tadpoles in a mug of water the previous tenant left on the roof top, God alone knowing what the mug was used for. That many bobbing up and down, in that little space. And many around the pool too. 

Say that man under the shower just outside the men’s changing rooms. Little does he know this is not his ghar da shaavar, or that open air ones are for a token rinse only. He just began shampooing his hair – eyes closed tight as if his jet is landing and such chaos between the hurrying hands and the hair that soap suds are flying to stick like white whales behind another’s behind; a man’s, the one next in line who is waiting his turn, respectfully keeping his back to the lathering spandex while keeping his front reserved for public gaze. As I notice his eyes trailing to the ladies side of this family-time pool-time, I wonder which is stronger - his elastic I hear crying SOS under a monstrous belly, or that one leg which carries all his weight as the other stylishly extends forward. With hands on tilted-hips, he’s discussing politics with two men swimming breadths at the deep end. Both men periodically sprout mysterious bubbles up their back whenever they stand still, or are not burping. I switch undigested Times Now off to turn my face away, hoping for pleasanter sights and sounds. Certainly less hairy ones! And that’s when I am enamoured by a bra.

A gang of girls about 40 years of age are having a mini-kitty in 3 feet water. Two have held on to the side rails and are floating belly-up, admiring their nail paint on the toes while two others stand bent at the knees, gracefully keeping their bergs below sea level. I can make out the discussion is serious. Could be about the class 12 board results, or about Mrs Nanda’s long nose – both horrific enough topics to garner haws and hmms. One kind-looking lady's eyes just bulged forward enough to touch the strapped goggles now fogged over with what could be rage. Must have heard Mrs Mehta changed her boutique. Clandestinely. And for those couple of seconds she stood up, with knees straightened, water to the waist, hand on mouth, head shaking side-to-side I saw it. A brassier under the costume! (How lovable must their bond be that he followed her chastely to the pool! Oh envy!) The straps seemed to match the costume frilly leotard she’s wearing, so certainly intentionally worn and not forgotten to remove when in a hurry. Why, it kind of matched well with the eye shadow too.

I did decide to get in, exactly when the two teens making chapatti dives at the deep end were leaving. But at the ladder I found a face staring at mine with such concentration in its eyes and pouted mouth. What is this? Ek choti si love story happening in the pool?

The child, about three years old, looked as lost as the Batman on his floats was in this Punjabi pool. He had stopped flapping (moving as successfully as a fish on a treadmill) a couple of seconds back, and now just floated. Staring. I climbed down holding the rail, eye-to-eye, in slow motion, suspecting a loving lunge or maybe a water proof firecracker going off under me making my one piece become three. Like a prank. His older sister was trying to swim underwater but ending up much above it instead. Something was up most definitely. Well, time revealed nothing was up at all. It was all down under, for soon as my toes felt the warm water, he turned around and screamed with an ace performer's glee – ‘Mummy, I just pee-pee on my own in the middle of swimming swimming.’

In the meantime, Mummy across the breadth was too busy to have heard her boy’s success story. The two political bums in the deep continued to laugh and bubble over jokes they shared, while their friend, the second-in-line, was now vigorously wiping himself with a towel near the shower, soaping-shampooing over, of course.

Might as well jump in now? Not me! 

You?

[Written for WordPress Daily Prompts : 365 Writing Prompts. The prompt for today was - Might as well Jump - What’s the biggest risk you’d like to take — but haven’t been able to? What would have to happen to make you comfortable taking it?]